CHAPTER 38 #2
I look at her, searching her face for something, anything: a denial, an explanation, an excuse that will fix everything. But I find only guilt, pure and raw, written in every line of her expression.
“Lidia, I…” she begins, taking a step toward me with her hand outstretched.
I instinctively step back, as if her closeness were burning my skin.
“It’s not what it looks like,” she says.
“Don’t touch me.”
My own voice sounds cold, broken, alien to me.
Barbara turns even paler, if that’s possible.
“Please, let me explain…”
“Explain what!?” I scream, feeling the pain rise from my chest to my throat and choke me. “What have you been lying to me about? That you’ve been fucking me while your girlfriend was in London? That you’ve been using me for your own pleasure during the trip?”
“I’ve never used you,” she replies, her voice breaking.
“Sure,” I say, the word dripping with bitterness.
Ingrid brings a hand to her forehead, visibly overwhelmed.
“Fucking?” she asks, incredulous and furious. “I can’t believe it… and here I was thinking your relationship with her was dead and buried. What an idiot I’ve been for not realizing it!”
My heart breaks completely. Every word Ingrid speaks is a precise stab that pierces deep into my chest. Not only because it confirms that Barbara has been hiding her relationship from me all this time, but because it reveals that I have been the secret, the fling, the interlude, the mistake made on vacation and then locked away.
Barbara turns to Ingrid, desperate, her eyes wide open.
“Ingrid, stop it, please.”
“Enough!?” she explodes, raising her voice just enough for the whole restaurant to hear. “Enough now!? After coming all the way here like a lovesick fool, thinking I had a girlfriend who missed me and was dying to see me!?”
The people around us aren’t even trying to hide their reactions anymore. My father and Miriam are standing a few feet away, tense, horrified, not knowing what to do. I see my father take a step toward me, but I raise a hand without even looking at him.
Barbara looks at me again. Her eyes are filled with tears that are starting to roll down her cheeks.
And, damn it, that infuriates me even more.
Because I don’t want to see her cry. Because a part of me still wants to run over and hug her and wipe away her tears with my fingers.
Because I still love her even now, in the midst of this betrayal, and that humiliates me in a way I can’t explain.
“I was going to fix it,” she says, her voice breaking and trembling. “I was going to tell you everything, I swear.”
I let out a hollow, bitter, incredulous laugh. It just comes out on its own, without me being able to control it.
“Sure. Just like always. Tomorrow. Later. At the perfect moment. When you decided it was the right time, right?”
“Lidia…”
“You know what the worst part is!?” I look her straight in the eye, even though I feel my heart bleeding with every beat.
“That I believed you. Again! That I trusted you unreservedly once more. That I thought once again that this time you would choose me unconditionally, with no secrets, with nothing standing between us.”
Barbara is now crying openly, her shoulders shaking slightly.
“I chose you. I told you that before.”
“No,” I cut her off firmly, though my voice trembles. “If you had truly chosen me, you wouldn’t have turned me into this. Into the other one. The one who stands there watching you leave and is left empty-handed.”
The silence between us is so thick that even Ingrid looks down, aware of the magnitude of what’s happening. Finally, she takes a deep breath, and then the rage with which she interrupted us in the restaurant turns to exhaustion.
“I’m not staying here to keep making a fool of myself in front of everyone,” she says, roughly wiping away a tear running down her cheek. “When you’re done deciding who you want… look for me. Or don’t. I don’t care anymore.”
She turns and starts walking toward the exit.
Barbara takes a step forward, hesitant. I feel the world holding its breath along with me. Because she can still choose. She can still do the right thing. She can still stay here, look at me, explain, put me first—even if it’s just once in her life.
But Barbara looks at me for just a second. Just one. In her eyes there is desperation, guilt, love… and fear. A great, deep fear that taints everything. Then she turns and runs after Ingrid without saying another word. Without touching me. Without explaining. Without choosing me. She leaves. Again.
I stand still in the middle of the restaurant, with the music playing faintly and distorted, the lights too bright, stinging my eyes, the uncomfortable murmur of the guests, and the taste of her last kiss still on my lips, sweet and bitter at the same time.
That’s the cruelest part of it all. That just a few minutes ago she was telling me she loved me and that she wanted us to fight for it together.
She promised me a future that’s now slipping away like sand through my fingers.
And now, while she runs after another woman, I’m left here, in front of everyone, feeling like the stupidest, most exposed, and most broken person on the planet.
I can’t breathe. My legs are shaking as if they were made of jelly. I don’t know if I’m going to fall to the ground or scream until I lose my voice. But luckily, my father comes over to me and wraps me in a protective embrace.
“Lidia…”
And then I completely break down. I shatter right there on the spot. An ugly, heart-wrenching sob escapes me, one that both embarrasses and liberates me at the same time. I bring a hand to my mouth, trying to hold it back, but I can’t.
“She did it to me again…” I manage to say through tears that won’t stop falling. “Dad… she did it to me again.”
He pulls me tighter against his chest, as if he wants to absorb all the pain with his body.
“I’m here, sweetheart. I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere.”
But it’s not enough. Because the void Barbara leaves when she leaves is always too big, too deep.
And this time it hurts worse than ever. Because this time she let me believe, let me dream, of a future that seemed possible once and for all.
Only to leave at the worst possible moment, when all I needed was for her to show me through her actions just how much she needed me.
Through my tears, I look up at the empty entrance to the restaurant, at the black night that has swallowed her up without mercy.
It is there, in that darkness, that I understand something that tears my soul apart forever: that there are loves that do not return to heal you, but to teach you that they can still break you even more, that there are still pieces of you that you didn’t know could shatter, and that once that happens, you are never the same again.